A Many-Faceted Author Is Named Poet Laureate

By IRVIN MOLOTSKY

Published: May 26, 1990

WASHINGTON, May 25—
Mark Strand, a poet, a translator of Spanish literature and a short-story writer, was named today the nation's fourth poet laureate.

The appointment of Mr. Strand, a professor of English at the University of Utah, was made by James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress. The largely ceremonial post carries a stipend of $35,000 a year and the laureate can make of it what he will, since there is no requirement, as exists in the British model on which it is based, that the American laureate produce poetry on demand to mark state occasions.

Mr. Strand's lines are short and bare, but the apparent simplicity is deceptive. The critic Richard Howard referred to his poetry as ''the workings of the divided self.''

In ''Keeping Things Whole,'' a work from 1964, the poet wrote:

In a field I am the absence of field.

This is always the case.

Whoever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

We all have reasons for moving.

I moved to keep things whole.

Mr. Strand, who was traveling from New York to Salt Lake City today and could not be reached for comment on his appointment, was born 56 years ago in Canada of American parents. He earned bachelor's degrees from Antioch College and Yale University and a master's degree from the University of Iowa. He has taught at many colleges including Mount Holyoke, Columbia, Yale, Brooklyn, Princeton, Brandeis, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan and Harvard.

The nation's first two laureates, Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur, did not write poetry to order. The third laureate, Howard Nemerov, complied, somewhat tongue in cheek, by writing a poem for the 1988 winner of the Presidency well in advance of the election, saying, ''It will serve for whichever of the entities makes it.''

In that work, Mr. Nemerov described the fruits of Presidential victory:

For this he gets to live in a grand house Infiltrated by a thousand tourists a day And overseen by servants, and the same Music is played wherever he walks The Yale critic Harold Bloom once said of the new poet laureate, ''Mark Strand dwells increasingly in a place apart from other contemporary poets.'' Mr. Bloom said the influence of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges on Mr. Strand, once noticeable, seemed to be receding.

Mr. Strand, in his book ''Reasons for Moving'' (1968, Atheneum), had cited approvingly this line of Mr. Borges's: ''While we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.''

Mr. Strand has translated works of the Spanish poets Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He has collected anthologies of other poets and has written three children's books.

When Mr. Strand published ''Darker'' in 1970 (Atheneum), Mr. Warren said of Mr. Strand, ''The moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration.''